IN twenty years what has been done in New York to solve the tenement-house problem?

The law has done what it could. That was not always a great deal, seldom more than barely sufficient for the moment. An aroused municipal conscience endowed the Health Department with almost autocratic powers in dealing with this subject, but the desire to educate rather than force the community into a better way dictated their exercise with a slow conservatism that did not always seem wise to the impatient reformer. New York has its St. Antoine, and it has often sadly missed a Napoleon

III. to clean up and make light in the dark corners. The obstacles, too, have been many and great. Nevertheless the authorities have not been idle, though it is a grave question whether all the improvements made under the sanitary regulations of recent years deserve the name. Tenements quite as bad as the worst are too numerous yet; but one tremendous factor for evil in the lives of the poor has been taken by the throat, and something has unquestionably been done, where that was possible, to lift those lives out of the rut where they were equally beyond the reach of hope and of ambition. It is no longer lawful to construct barracks to cover the whole of a lot. Air and sunlight
have a legal claim, and the day of rear tenements
is past. Two years ago a hundred thousand people burrowed
in these inhuman dens; but some have been torn down
since. Their number will decrease steadily until they
shall have become a bad tradition of a heedless past.
The dark, unventilated bedroom is going with them,
and the open sewer. The day is at hand when the greatest
of all evils that now curse life in the tenements--the
dearth of water in the hot summer days--will also
have been remedied, and a long step taken toward the
moral and physical redemption of their tenants.

Public sentiment has done something also, but very
far from enough. As a rule, it has slumbered peacefully
until some flagrant outrage on decency and the health
of the community aroused it to noisy but ephemeral
indignation, or until a dreaded epidemic knocked at
our door. It is this unsteadiness of purpose that
has been to a large extent responsible for the apparent
lagging of the authorities in cases not involving
immediate danger to the general health. The law needs
a much stronger and readier backing of a thoroughly
enlightened public sentiment to make it as effective
as it might be made. It is to be remembered that the
health officers, in dealing with this subject of dangerous
houses, are constantly trenching upon what each landlord
considers his private rights, for which he is ready
and bound to fight to the last. Nothing short of the
strongest pressure will avail to convince him that
these individual rights are to be surrendered for
the clear benefit of the whole. It is easy enough
to convince a man that he ought not to harbor the
thief who steals people's property; but to make him
see that he has no right to slowly kill his neighbors,
or his tenants, by making a death-trap of his house, seems to be the hardest of all tasks. It is apparently
the slowness of the process that obscures his mental
sight. The man who will fight an order to repair the
plumbing in his house through every court he can reach,
would suffer tortures rather than shed the blood of
a fellow-man by actual violence. Clearly, it is a
matter of education on the part of the landlord no
less than the tenants.

In spite of this, the
landlord has done his share; chiefly perhaps by
yielding--not always gracefully--when it was no
longer of any use to fight. There have been exceptions,
however: men and women who have mended and built
with an eye to the real welfare of their tenants
as well as to their own pockets. Let it be well
understood that the two are inseparable, if any
good is to come of it. The business of housing
the pool; if it is to amount to anything, must
be business, as it was business with our fathers
to put them where they are. As charity, pastime,
or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.
This is an inexorable rule, now thoroughly well
understood in England and continental Europe,
and by all who have given the matter serious thought
here. Call it poetic justice, or divine justice,
or anything else, it is a hard fact, not to be
gotten over. Upon any other plan than the assumption
that the workman has a just claim to a decent
home, and the right to demand it, any scheme for
his relief fails. It must be a fair exchange of
the man's money for what he can afford to buy
at a reasonable price. Any charity scheme merely turns him into a pauper, however it may be disguised,
and drowns him hopelessly in the mire out of which
it proposed to pull him. And this principle must
pervade the whole plan. Expert

management of model
tenements succeeds where amateur management, with
the best intentions, gives up the task, discouraged,
as a flat failure. Some of the best-conceived
enterprises, backed by abundant capital and goodwill,
have been wrecked on this rock. Sentiment, having
prompted the effort, forgot to stand aside and
let business make it. Business, in a wider sense,
has done more than all other agencies together
to wipe out the worst tenements. It has been New
York's real Napoleon III., from whose decree there
was no appeal. In ten years I have seen plague
spots disappear before its onward march, with
which health officers, police, and sanitary science
had struggled vainly since such struggling began
as a serious business. And the process goes on
still. Unfortunately, the crowding in some of
the most densely packed quarters down town has
made the property there so valuable, that relief
from this source is less confidently to be expected, at all events in the near future. Still, their time may come also. It comes so quickly sometimes
as to fairly take one's breath away. More than
once I have returned, after a few brief weeks, to some specimen rookery in which
I was interested, to find it gone and an army of workmen
delving twenty feet underground to lay the foundation
of a mighty warehouse. That was the case with the "Big
Flat" in Mott Street. I had not had occasion to
visit it for several months last winter, and when I
went there, entirely unprepared for a chance, I could
not find it. It had always been conspicuous enough in
the landscape before, and I marvelled much at my own
stupidity until, by examining the number of the house,
I found out that I had gone right. It was the "flat"
that had disappeared. In its place towered a six-story
carriage factory with business going on on every floor,
as if it had been there for years and years.

This same "Big
Flat" furnished a good illustration of why
some well-meant efforts in tenement building have
failed. Like Gotham Court, it was originally built
as a model tenement, but speedily came to rival
the Court in foulness. It became a regular hot-bed
of thieves and peace-breakers, and made no end
of trouble for the police. The immediate reason,
outside of the lack of proper supervision, was
that it had open access to two streets in a neighborhood
where thieves and "toughs" abounded.
These took advantage of an arrangement that had
been supposed by the builders to be a real advantage
as a means of ventilation, and their occupancy
drove honest folk away. Murderers' Alley, of which
I have spoken elsewhere, and the sanitary inspector's
experiment with building a brick wall athwart
it to shut off travel through the block, is a
parallel case.The causes that operate to obstruct
efforts to better the

lot of the tenement population
are, in our day, largely found among the tenants
themselves. This is true particularly of the poorest.
They are shiftless, destructive, and stupid; in
a word, they are what the tenements have made
them. It is a dreary old truth that those who
would fight for the poor must fight the poor to
do it. It must be confessed that there is little
enough in their past experience to inspire confidence
in the sincerity of the effort to help them. I
recall the discomfiture of a certain well-known
philanthropist, since deceased, whose heart beat
responsive to other suffering than that of human kind. He was a large owner of tenement
property, and once undertook to it out his houses with
stationary tabs, sanitary plumbing, wood-closets, and
all the latest improvements. He introduced his rough
tenants to all this magnificence without taking the
precaution of providing a competent housekeeper, to
see that the new acquaintances got on together. He felt
that his tenants ought to be grateful for the interest
he took in them. They were. They found the boards in
the wood-closets fine kindling wood, while the pipes
and faucets were as good as cash at the junk shop. In
three months the owner had to remove what was left of
his improvements. The pipes were cut and the houses
running full of water, the stationary tubs were put
to all sorts of uses except washing, and of the wood-closets
not a trace was left. The philanthropist was ever after
a firm believer in the total depravity of tenement-house
people. Others have been led to like reasoning by as
plausible arguments, without discovering that the shiftlessness
and ignorance that offended them were the consistent
crop of the tenement they were trying to reform, and
had to be included in the effort. The owners of a block
of model tenements uptown had got their tenants comfortably
settled, and were indulging in high hopes of their redemption
under proper management, when a contractor ran up a
row of "skin" tenements, shaky but fair to
look at, with brown-stone trimmings and gewgaws. The
result was to tempt a lot of the well-housed tenants
away. It was a very astonishing instance of perversity
to the planners of the benevolent scheme; but, after
all, there was nothing strange in it. It is all a matter
of education, as I said about the landlord.

That the education comes slowly need excite
no surprise. The forces on the other side are
ever active. The faculty of the tenement for
appropriating to itself every foul thing that
comes within its reach, and piling up and intensifying
its corruption until out of all proportion to
the beginning, is something marvellous. Drop
a case of scarlet fever, of measles, or of diphtheria
into one of these barracks, and, unless it is
caught at the very start and stamped out, the
contagion of the one case will sweep block after
block, and half people a graveyard. Let the
police break up a vile dive, goaded by the angry
protests of the neighborhood--forthwith the
outcasts set in circulation by the raid betake
themselves to the tenements, where in their
hired rooms, safe from interference, they set
up as many independent centres of contagion,
infinitely more destructive, each and every
one, than was the known dive before. I am not
willing to affirm that this is the police reason
for letting so many of the dives alone; but
it might well be.

They are perfectly familiar
with the process, and entirely helpless to prevent it.

This faculty, as inherent in the problem itself--the
prodigious increase of the tenement-house population
that goes on without cessation, and its consequent
greater crowding--is the chief obstacle to its
solution. In 1869 there were 14,872 tenements
in New York, with a population of 468,492 persons.

In 1879 the number of the tenements was estimated
at 21,000, and their tenants had passed the
half-million mark. At the end of the year 1888,
when a regular census was made for the first
time since 1869, the showing was: 32,390 tenements,
with a population of 1,093,701 souls. To-day
we have 37,316 tenements, including 2,630 rear
houses, and their population is over 1,250,000.
A large share of this added population, especially
of that which came to us from abroad, crowds
in below Fourteenth Street, where the population
is already packed beyond reason, and confounds all attempts to make matters better there.
At the same time new slums are constantly growing
up uptown, and have to be kept down with a firm hand.
This drift of the population to the great cities has
to be taken into account as a steady factor. It will
probably increase rather than decrease for many years
to come. At the beginning of the century the percentage
of our population that lived in cities was as one
in twenty-five. In 1880 it was one in four and one-half,
and in 1890 the census will in all probability show
it to be one in four. Against such tendencies, in
the absence of suburban outlets for the crowding masses,
all remedial measures must prove more or less ineffective.
The "confident belief" expressed by the
Board of Health in 1874, that rapid transit would
solve the problem, is now known to have been a vain
hope.

Workingmen, in New York at all events, will live
near their work, no matter at what sacrifice of comfort--one
might almost say at whatever cost, and the city will
never be less crowded than it is. To distribute the
crowds as evenly as possible is the effort of the
authorities, where nothing better can be done. In
the first six months of the present year 1,068 persons
were turned out of not quite two hundred tenements
below Houston Street by the sanitary police on their
midnight inspections, and this covered only a very
small part of that field. The uptown tenements were
practically left to take care of themselves in this
respect.

The quick change of economic conditions in the city
that often outpaces all plans of relief, rendering
useless to-day what met the demands of the situation
well enough yesterday, is another cause of perplexity.
A common obstacle also--I am inclined to think quite
as common as in Ireland, though we hear less of it
in the newspaper--is the absentee landlord. The home
article, who fights for his rights, as he chooses
to consider them, is bad enough; but the absentee
landlord is responsible for no end of trouble. Be
was one of the first obstructions the sanitary reformers
stumbled over, when the Health Department took hold.
It reported in 1869 that many of the tenants were
entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to
their requests to have the houses put in order was
an invitation to pay their rent or get out. "Inquiry
often disclosed the fact that the owner of the property
was a wealthy gentleman or lady, either living in
an aristocratic part of the city, or in a neighboring
city, or, as was occasionally found to be the case,
in Europe. The property is usually managed entirely
by an agent, whose instructions are simple but emphatic:
Collect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the
occupants." The Committee having the matter in
charge proposed to compel owners of tenements with
ten families or more to put a housekeeper in the house,
who should be held responsible to the Health Department.
Unluckily the powers of the Board gave out at that
point, and the proposition was never acted upon. Could
it have been, much trouble would have been spared
the Health Board, and untold suffering the tenants
in many houses. The tribe of absentee landlords is
by no means extinct in New York. Not a few who fed
from across the sea to avoid being crushed by his
heel there have groaned under it here, scarcely profiting
by the exchange. Sometimes--it can hardly be said
in extenuation--the heel that crunches is applied
in saddening ignorance. I recall the angry indignation
of one of these absentee landlords, a worthy man who,
living far away in the country, had inherited city
property, when he saw the condition of his slum tenements.
The man was shocked beyond expression, all the more
because he did not know whom to blame except himself
for the state of things that had aroused his wrath,
and yet, conscious of the integrity of his intentions,
felt that he should not justly be held responsible.

The experience of this
landlord points directly to the remedy which the
law failed to supply to the early reformers. It
has since been fully demonstrated that a competent
agent on the premises, a man of the best and the
highest stamp, who knows how to instruct and guide
with a firm band, is a prerequisite to the success
of any reform tenement scheme. This is a plain
business proposition, that has been proved entirely
sound in some notable instances of tenement building,
of which more hereafter. Even among the poorer
tenements, those are always the best in which
the owner himself lives. It is a hopeful sign
in any case. The difficulty of procuring such
assistance without having to pay a ruinous price,
is one of the obstructions that have vexed in
this city efforts to solve the problem of housing
the poor properly, because it presupposes that
the effort must be made on a larger scale than
has often been

attempted. The readiness with which
the tenants respond to intelligent efforts in
their behalf, when made under fair conditions,
is as surprising as it is gratifying, and fully
proves the claim that tenants are only satisfied in filthy and unwholesome surroundings because
nothing better is offered. The moral effect is
as great as the improvement of their physical
health. It is clearly discernible in the better
class of tenement dwellers to-day. The change
in the character of the colored population in
the few years since it began to move out of the
wicked rookeries of the old "Africa"
to the decent tenements in Yorkville, furnishes
a notable illustration, and a still
better one is found in the contrast between the model
tenement in the Mulberry Street Bend and the barracks
across the way, of which I spoke in the chapter devoted
to the Italian. The Italian himself is the strongest
argument of all. With his fatal contentment in the filthiest
surroundings, he gives undoubted evidence of having
in him the instinct of cleanliness that, properly cultivated,
would work his rescue in a very little while. It is
a queer contradiction, but the fact is patent to anyone
who has observed the man in his home-life. And he is
not alone in this. I came across an instance, this past
summer, of how a refined, benevolent personality works
like a leaven in even the roughest tenement-house crowd.
This was no model tenement; far from it. It was a towering
barrack in the Tenth Ward, sheltering more than twenty
families. All the light and air that entered its interior
came through an air-shaft two feet square, upon which
two bedrooms and the hall gave in every story. In three
years I had known of two domestic

tragedies, prompted by poverty
and justifiable disgust with life, occurring in
the house, and had come to look upon it as a typically
bad tenement, quite beyond the pale of possible
improvement. What was my surprise, when chance
led me to it once more after a while, to find
the character of the occupants entirely changed.
Some of the old ones were there still, but they
did not seem to be the same people. I discovered
the secret to be the new housekeeper, a tidy,
mild-mannered, but exceedingly strict little body,
who had a natural faculty of drawing her depraved
surroundings within the beneficent sphere of her
strong sympathy, and withal of exacting respect
for her orders. The worst elements had been banished
from the house in short order under her management,
and for the rest a new era of self-respect had
dawned. They were, as a body, as vastly superior
to the general run of their class as they had
before seemed below it. And this had been effected
in the short space of a single year. My observations
on this point are more than confirmed by those
of nearly all the practical tenement reformers
I have known, who have patiently held to the course they had laid down. One of these, whose experience
exceeds that of all of the rest together, and
whose influence for good has been

very great,
said to me recently: "I hold that not ten
per cent. of the people now living in tenements
would refuse to avail themselves of the best improved
conditions offered, and come fully up to the use
of them, properly instructed; but they cannot
get them. They are up to them now, fully, if the
chances were only offered. They don't have to
come up. It is all a gigantic mistake on the part
of the public, of which these poor people are
the victims. I have built homes for more than
five hundred families in fourteen years, and I
have been getting daily more faith in human nature
from my work among the poor tenants, though approaching
that nature on a plane and under conditions that
could scarcely promise better for disappointment."
It is true that my friend has built his houses
in Brooklyn; but human nature does not differ
greatly on the two shores of the East River. For
those who think it does, it may be well

to remember
that only five years ago the Tenement House Commission summed up
the situation in this city in the declaration
that, "the condition of the tenants is in
advance of the houses which they occupy,"
quite the severest arraignment of the tenement
that had yet been uttered. The many philanthropic
efforts that have been made in the last few years
to render less intolerable the lot of the tenants
in the homes where many of them must continue
to live, have undoubtedly had their effect in
creating a disposition to accept better things,
that will make plainer sailing for future builders
of model tenements. In many ways, as in the "College
Settlement" of courageous girls, the Neighborhood
Guilds, through the efforts of the King's Daughters,
and numerous other schemes of practical mission
work, the poor and the well-to-do have been brought
closer together in an every-day companionship
that cannot but be productive of the best results,
to the one who gives no less than to the one who

receives. And thus, as a good lady wrote to me
once, though the problem stands yet unsolved,
more perplexing than ever; though the bright spots
in the dreary picture be too often bright only
by comparison, and many of the expedients hit
upon for relief sad makeshifts, we can dimly discern
behind it all that good is somehow working out
of even this slough of despond the while it is
deepening and widening in our sight, and in His
own good season, if we labor on with courage and
patience, will bear fruit sixty and a hundred
fold.